Gun Machine's opening pages are a shotgun-delivered statement of intent: a naked lunatic is gunned down in a frantic shootout that approaches black comedy, along with one of the two police detectives who are pursuing him. It's a ludicrous pace with which to open, and one that, you would assume, Warren Ellis would be unable to maintain. You would assume wrong.

Surviving detective John Tallow notices a gun-blasted hole into an apartment and, inside it, a weapons cache hundreds-deep hanging from the walls. It transpires that these are famous guns: there's a flintlock pistol used in one of the first murders on record in New York; guns used by the police to take down criminals; even serial killer Son of Sam's .44 Bulldog. (It's perhaps here that you most notice the influence of Ellis's award-winning comics work, notably the near-fetishistic gun-porn notes of his seminal cyberpunk saga Transmetropolitan.) Each gun has subsequently been used to commit another murder before being stored as a trophy, leaving behind a vast number of unsolved cases. In a move clearly intended to bury his career, Tallow is ordered to find out who is behind it. He's given no time to mourn his partner; no time to breathe.

It's a tribute to Ellis's exceptional skills that you don't need to take that breath either. As Tallow assembles a team to help him – a pair of crime-scene unit investigators, filthy-mouthed, larger than life, pushed to the verge of caricature but never slipping over – the story doesn't let up. The narrative splits its focus between Tallow and the killer, sometimes bringing them within a hair's breadth of each other, and is written with the precision of the finest procedurals. Tallow is likable, a gruff loner who mourns the days of vinyl records and print media, yet embraces modern technology. It's as if a younger Rebus had been dragged to New York, given a sense of humour and allowed to unwind a little. The killer is equally well realised, a curiously controlled psychopath whose motive and skills lead you to believe him unstoppable.

Both characters are entwined with New York, obsessed with its history and how it became the place it is. We see two sides of the city: its past, through occasionally surreal mini-history lessons delivered by the killer and other characters; and the five-minutes-into-the-future representation of the modern day that Tallow inhabits. Technology is utilised in a way that occasionally makes Gun Machine read like an issue of Wired magazine with action scenes. Tablets and e-readers, Wi-Fi pods, print-on-demand newspapers that aggregate social media feeds, internet "Wizards" to manipulate ping maps, telephones that mould to the shape of the caller's hand: it all makes the most modern metropolis feel distinct and unique, while remaining the city we're familiar with from countless other representations.

There are moments as the novel progresses when the pace threatens to get away from itself. In the later stages, some slightly artificial leaps of logic are necessary to keep things moving forward; while some characters appear in the endgame whom you wish you'd spent more time with earlier. But these are minor quibbles, and in a novel as fast as this one, you're never left waiting around long enough to dwell on them.

Ellis's previous writing (especially in his debut novel, Crooked Little Vein) tended to be driven by a furious sense of chaos. It was constantly and consistently entertaining, but occasionally that chaos pushed it away from more commercial sensibilites. By streamlining it here into a more overtly accessible form, Gun Machine succeeds in being exactly what it wants to be: a magnificently entertaining gun held to the head of the crime thriller genre.